Welcome to 'Stephen Riley Art' - the website of artist Stephen Riley
Stephen Riley’s paintings are conflations of possibilities within the various media used and references to the seen environment in its broadest sense – space/spatial relationships, architecture, things seen and half-seen in the artificial space of the television screen etc.. Many paintings therefore start as process-based experiments and are then changed and finished under the influence of the things to which they seem to have made reference as they have developed. Others start with some reference point but may then be diverted by the media and other references, and others are responses to earlier paintings which have suggested further developments and experiments.
Relationships between suggestions of pictorial space and real, sculptural space in built-up or layered surfaces are important considerations, as are those between chaos and order or freedom and control. Since many of the paintings are experimental, many are rejected and of these some become the basis of new work. Consequently, notions such as rescue, rebuilding and the passage of time are recurrent themes. However, since the paintings are seldom representational, metaphorical possibilities tend to be in the eye of the viewer. Titles often allude to one or more such possibilities but, given the availability of the paintings to subjective interpretation, references made sometimes remain mysterious.
Stephen Riley Phd - Artist
Contemporary British Art
Abstract Painting
www.stephenrileyart.com